Research

 Exposure and Rejection therapy   

In my own journey with anxiety exposure therapy is something I have been familiar with for quite a few years now having taken part in multiple rounds of it, down to only finishing my most recent go at it a few weeks before this project started. Exposure therapy is basically a behavioural therapy technique where a person dealing with anxiety and panic conditions will gradually be exposed to a triggering object or experience, this is repeated until the persons anxiety levels decrease to a normal amount. In my personal experience this type of therapy is definitely a more taxing and scary approach but when practiced the results can be so dramatically beneficial. 

Rejection therapy is something I recently came across on social media, this video of a woman doing some kind of yoga in a busy public pavement, the person videoing asked her politely what she was doing and explained it was part of her rejection therapy. I'd never heard of this before but immediately thought it could relate to my project so decided to look into it a little more. This idea began with the author Jason Comley (2016) but has been made popular through the Ted talk of Jia Jiang (2017) who took on a 100 day challenge of rejection therapy blogging and videoing his experience. The basic idea is that a person seeks out interactions were they will experience some kind of rejection for at least 30 days to gain courage and resilience. Some of the tasks that Jia Jiang set out and completed seem outlandish or crazy, like borrowing £100 from a stranger or racing a random person but he did set three rules, had to be legal, had to be ethical and abide the laws of physics. This concept has gone pretty viral on social media with most saying that it has had a positive impact on overcoming fear. There isn't yet any medical or scientific research or writing to back up this technique but to me it seems like an adapted version of exposure therapy so I could see how it could help people if done right. 

I believe both these ideas to be pertinent to my current project. This project evolved and became a way for me to get over certain social anxieties I experience, realising this I wanted to try avoid making it a messy art therapy piece and make sure it wasn't going to make me worse. Choosing to take the subtle performative route definitely helped this. The leaf sewing is subtle but builds over time as more leaves cover the clothes, its non threating but slightly curious. I was making myself perceived to get over this fear of being perceived by others, and it did work by the end I was much more confident and didn't think about what others were thinking. In a way I think I unknowingly adapted both the exposure and rejection therapy ideas and explored them through artistic means. 

TED. (2017, January 6). What I learned from 100 days of rejection | Jia Jiang | TED. YouTube. https://youtu.be/-vZXgApsPCQ?si=kRidezms1XFRYLgN

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